[wtallis]

Cost isn't what's preventing Apple or anyone else from doing this. The patents are. They have titles like "Method and Apparatus for Minimizing Latency in Digital Signal Processing Systems".

[paletoy]

Maybe i'm optimistic ,but building a dsp that connects to a few mics and an earphone amp using low latency adc's is protected.

And the other stuff is software, which in general is very hard to enforce patents on with torrents etc.